"...that's adorable, gosh."

"She's kind of like that all the time!"

"Well you know when I'm free, we should make it happen."

"Do I still know when you're free or are you about to schedule a hangout with your sister?"

"I'll add it to my calendar whenever it happens. Do you want to come with, by the way? I'm not sure what it'll even be like but... Now that the possibility's on the table, I confess to being curious about what it's like to be the nepotistically chosen heir to a capitalist empire and she probably has a lot of experience with that to share."

"Sure, why not, especially if it can be timed when I'm backlashing for efficiency."

"That can probably be arranged."

Haru comes home from a dungeon forty-five minutes later than expected and backlashing pretty bad, though he's on top of it enough to locate Jaeha and burrow under his shirt without encountering any psychiatric dangers. "Wow I love not having to take the subway, hail Quasar, hi how are you."

Quite frankly? In love with you. 

He can't say it. Even though that's the emotion he's feeling right now, is overflowing with love for this beautiful man the gods placed directly on his path, even though both of them know it's true, he hasn't said that word yet. He hasn't said it and he's not ready to say it. But it's true. 

"Ecstatic to see my Haru back in my arms, safe and soon to be sound."

"Wow, warn me before you say things like that, I might swoon. Why is there still a shirt here, why do we even wear shirts." Shoo, shirt. "I am increasingly incredulous with my past self for having put up with my previous partnership situation for several years when I could have instead simply gone around poking everybody in the general Sea of Japan region till I found you."

"I hear that there are as many as several people who aren't me in the general Sea of Japan region," he says, then kisses the top of Haru's head.

Kisses are very important for backlashed Harus. "Mmmmm. - do you wanna see what my backlash is like, I kind of hate it but you might be weirdly into it and it does do the making me want to be seen thing -"

"—your—you mean with my powers? Yes, but—"

"But?"

"I don't know, I feel like nice things shouldn't happen this often and so I should object to them."

"My Jaeha, that is very silly. Go ahead."

My Jaeha sends a shivery thrill down his spine, as it always does. "Okay," he says, and then perhaps he can look.

More than any of Haru's nonmagical emotions, the loneliness is physical.

Haru's doing that on purpose, pushing on it constantly, a long-ingrained habit kept in force by frustration and embarrassment and fear that rears up whenever the backlash tries to squidge into fawning desperation or, worse, philosophy.  When it's somatic, the touch-starvation hurts, all of his skin aches with it, he's as fragile and empty as spun sugar... but it's a misery he can inspect, can lucidly choose to incur and endure.  It's less directly compulsive, in this form.  He has to do something about it or else devote all his attention to refraining, but when it's simmering in his bones and not his mind, he can choose what to do about it.  He can choose to make a phone call or choose to pet his cat or choose to -

Well.  There's Jaeha.

The visceral craving for contact that is currently chewing on Haru is very interested in Jaeha.

Everyone likes guiding, it's unanimously acknowledged as an exquisite sensation, but for most people that's relatively incidental to the backlash itself.  It's a learned correspondence between relief from a typical backlash and touch with a compatible esper.  Someone who gets stomach cramps, who goes blind, who hears voices, who shivers with fever, doesn't intrinsically and naturally feel that the solution to this problem is to wrap themselves up in the guiding touch of their partner, any more than it was ever intuitively obvious that oral rehydration solution would be a great way to treat dysentery.  Some backlashes even outright fight guiding, like Yamanaka's.

Haru's backlash knows exactly what ought to help him feel less like he's dying of needing a hug, and sometimes it's right.  With Jaeha, it is exactly and deliciously right, that this is what Haru needs, is Jaeha's skin on his, Jaeha's mouth on his, Jaeha chasing away the lurking terror that no one likes him (even as this psychic vulnerability itself stings with the possibility that maybe Jaeha doesn't, or did a second ago but not now after a look at all of this ugliness, all of Haru's damage).  Every moment of touch is dissolving the full-body lassitude and the insidious insane suspicion that lonely means alone means there's maybe no one else in the world.  Haru wants Jaeha and Haru is getting Jaeha and it feels so, so good to be able to feel that Jaeha is there when merely knowing it wouldn't be enough.

It's not unfrightening to be letting Jaeha observe the depths of his desperation.  Being empathically read, on purpose, while backlashed like this, is barely short of naked pleading.  For something he was realistically going to get anyway.  But he has enough trust, for this - enough security in Jaeha's enduring interest, enough of a guess that Jaeha might find this oversharing actively endearing.  Still, if it's uncomfortable to be absorbing the force of Haru's backlash, however indirectly, they can stop any time Jaeha wants -